Conference hydra::dejavu

1203.0. "Consciousness, Hemispheric Brain, Garden of Eden " by REGENT::WAGNER () Tue Jan 16 1990 02:04

    Cindy,

	I brought this reply out into a new note because I wanted to finish 
    up my response to your reply in 1078, to stop interrupting the flow of 
    that note and also explore a new idea that that reply of yours brought 
    to mind.
    
    I have been very involved and highly welmed (not quite overwhelmed)
    with finishing up this semester in school. I read .23 a few days
    ago while in a very foggy state of mind and couldn't understand how
    your reply related to what I had entered. I generally agree with
    you in the statement : "...,however I'm not sure it is possible
    to lose what one doesn't have."  I just don't understand what this
    is in reference to?  Maybe I am still in somewhat of a fog. 
    
    	"..would there have been a chance to perceive the continuum
    out of the jumble that existed before the split?"
    
  	I wonder if it would have been necessary.  Consider that question.
     It is the right brain that needs to have a continuum. a continuum
    is a logical classification.  I maintain that science and religion
    are aspects of the same thing, not something different from each
    other that we measure on a continuum.  if it is a continuum where
    is the logical extreme of each side of this continuum?  is anything
    after religion?  is there anything on the other side of science,
    or is it more circular?  Science-religion back to science, etc.
    But even this is a construct of the mind. Science and religion just
    are.  They are both means of making sense of this universe. Each
    attack the problem differently.  Both use reason, both use logic
    to try to justify their existence and find some solutions to their
    questions.  Science had it's basis in religion.  There were three devout 
    English Protestants who laid the foundations of physics, psychology and 
    biology:  Isaac Newton who wrote down God's speech in the universal laws 
    of celestial gravitation; John Locke with the "knowing experience," and 
   John Ray, an ecclesiastic, wrote about the Creator's perfection in designing 
   the animal and plant life.  Without this religious motivation, science would 
   have been mere technology, advancing only when an economic necessity.
    
    "Taking this a level further, (for those who believe in a
    God/Goddess/ATI), the creation originated as a result of God trying
    to understand itself.  Would this have been possible had God not
    created an image to reflect back on?"
    
    
    I don't really know.  This statement includes an assumption 
    that S/he thinks and reasons as we do and needs to understand itself.
    Anyway, why must those of us who believe in a God, believe in the old 
    Testament Version of a God?  Your statement seems contradictory to God's  
    alleged onmiscience and omnipotence.  I believe that man made (or at least 
    describes) God in man's image, in an attempt to reduce the unknowable and 
    unbounded into knowable and structure.
    
    	I can make sense of what you were saying about the 
    split of the mind way back when and the story of the Garden of Eden
    could support this in a way.  Total integration of the 
    mind , I believe, would allow us to be want for nothing as was the
    environment of the Garden.  To have intuition and a wholistic
    approach integrated with reason might produce a gestalt of understanding
    and part of this gestalt might include Grace.  There is a text titled
    "The Origin of Consciousness And The  Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind,"  
    By Julian Jaynes. Jaynes, upon the invitation of the American 
    Psychological Association, addressed the central ideas of this text 
    publicly.    I was wondering if anybody has read it?  

	I decided to wait a while before entering this note and read the 
above mentioned book.  I read most of the book over last week end.  The 
following attempt to describe what Jaynes was writing about is rather 
simplistic given the time and space to recount it.  Jaynes 
proposes that the human consciousness did not begin far back in animal 
evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier 
hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe around three thousand 
years ago and is still developing.  Jaynes wrote that before language existed, 
mankind could not have a consciousness. He says that Consciousness is found in 
introspection and narration.  Without metaphors such as <I> a person could not 
be subjective and make decisions on his own.  Jaynes also proposed that the 
right brain hemisphere had more power in relation to the Left Brain hemisphere 
than it does now.  The right side is also the side that produces 
hallucinations when electrical impulses are applied to certain areas of the 
right side.  Jaynes says that the right side was able to give structure to 
sounds originating in the left side.  He called this structure the bicameral 
mind.  He likens this to the Schizophrenic who may have both visual and 
auditory hallucinations.  Jaynes proposes that the auditory hallucinations of 
those who lived three thousand + years ago were the voices of the gods.  Since 
the people of that era didn't have the language of narration and metaphors, 
they could not live subjectively; They lived as the gods told them to live. 
Did what the Gods told them to do. As language became more complicated, nouns 
came into use more and more.  The analog "I" enabled people to become more 
subjective.  They were starting to make decisions for themselves.  They began 
losing their right brain dominance and were losing touch with the voices of 
the gods.  Around the time of Moses, the voices could only be summoned during 
times of stress. Jaynes theorized that Moses was able to maintain his 
bicameral mind most consistantly, thus was able to proclaim that the voice he 
heard was the voice of the one and true God. the visions of prophets might 
have been caused by momentary reversion to the bicameral mind under times of 
stress.  One who operated in the bicameral mind tended to be more submissive, 
suggestable, and dependent in the presence of authority figures. This is not 
to imply that Moses did not hear the voice of the old testament deity.
	Jaynes covers a section of what he calls "vestiges of the Bicameral 
mind.   He shows how Schizophrenia, hypnosis, glossolalia (speaking in 
tongues), and possession may be vestiges of the bicameral mind.  I found it 
very interesting.  Jaynes proposes that science is a result of the breakdown 
of the bicameral mind as is the erosion of the religious view of man in these 
last years of this second millenium.


	This short overview of the book does not do it justice.  I wanted to 
read it because I have been pondering over the idea of human intelligence and 
artifical intelligence and thought that this text might help me understand 
where the difference might lie.  I was wondering if the difference might lie 
in the subjectivity of humankind; the ability of mankind to create it's own 
problems.  I'm not sure an artificial intelligence could be created that could 
be considered "subjective."  

	This infomation puts a different bend on the "parable" of the GArden 
of Eden.  The partaking of that tree of truth and knowledge might be a 
reference to mankinds becoming more subjective with increased language and 
losing the voice of God. Perhaps in the bicameral mind, existed a state like 
hypnosis in which nothing is questioned, and there is no attachment because 
there is no subjectivity.    
Because there is no attachment,The Garden represents a state of perpetual 
realization, of Grace.  The Garden provided everything.  There could be no 
ownership as everything was in abundance and there for the taking.  There 
could also be no ownerhip because there was no sense of "I."  The sense of "I" 
came with the creation of Eve as a companion.  With Eve (and others) came 
language.  With language came increased dominance of the left side (which Eve 
may represent.)  NOw that language came into being, the right side needed be 
only concerned with  logical patterns.  Thus the breakdown of the bicameral 
mind into consciousness that exists today.

Cindy, your reply was definitely an incentive to read a book I have known 
about for some time now but have been putting off for various reasons.  His 
revolutionary ideas gave me a new level of understanding of the whole. 

Thank you,
ERnie